Above a plain chest-tomb, just over two metres long and resting on a moulded base, sits an inscribed slab flanked by pilasters that support free-standing obelisks. The whole assembly is crowned by the McNamara coat-of-arms, carved in low false relief, and the effect is less triumphant than reflective, the stonework worn enough now that the inscription beneath requires some patience to read.

The monument was erected in 1686 by John MacNamara of Limerick, the firstborn son of James MacNamara and his wife Helen Lee of Ennis, who are buried here. John commissioned it not only for his parents but, as the Latin inscription makes explicit, for himself and his heirs as well, an act of forward-looking commemoration as much as grief. The coat-of-arms is divided per pale, the two halves carrying arrowheads, a crescent, a lion rampant, three boars' heads between a chevron, a helmet, and an arm holding a lance, the combined heraldic imagery of the MacNamara family rendered with considerable detail despite the overall weathering of the stone. The Latin text opens with a conventional memorial formula before shifting register entirely. After a brief moral epigram on the passage of time, it closes with a direct quotation from Job 19: "Have pity on me, have pity on me, O you my friends." The choice is striking. Job's words in that chapter are a cry from someone who feels abandoned and reduced, and placing them on a monument intended to last across generations gives the inscription an emotional candour that formal funerary Latin rarely allows itself.

Ennis Friary, a Franciscan foundation established in the thirteenth century, contains a number of medieval and early modern monuments, and this one sits among them without drawing particular attention to itself. The chest-tomb form, a rectangular stone box raised on a base, was a common funerary format across late medieval and early modern Ireland, though the obelisk-flanked slab above elevates this example into something more architecturally self-conscious. The friary is in state care and is generally accessible during the summer months, and the chancel wall where the monument stands is visible once inside the roofless nave.